


All Things in Time

by poisontaster



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Character of Color, Episode: s01e12 Captain Jack Harkness, F/M, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-08
Updated: 2007-01-08
Packaged: 2019-05-26 13:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15002078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: Jack keeps his promises.





	All Things in Time

**Author's Note:**

> Something I can't explain  
> Keeps me running, afraid  
> And every day, looks me in the face and says  
> Who'd you think you were, anyway?
> 
> If you'll hold a light for me to see  
> All things in time, all well ever need.
> 
> -Toad the Wet Sprocket, "All Things in Time"

Toshiko doesn't really know when she understood that there would be no rescue, no eleventh hour save. She'd seen so many extraordinary, miraculous things…it seems impossible that there wouldn't be one for her, for them, her and Jack.

She does remember excusing herself to go into the ladies' sometime close to the dirty, peeping dawn and have herself a good cry though.

*

Jack keeps his promises.

It's why he makes so few of them, besides the fact that it's completely unfashionable for a self-styled con man.

But he promised Toshiko. 

_(I'll take care of you)_

He's got more years (decades, centuries?) of grift behind him than in this new reinvention; with them, he gets them rooms and, eventually, a house. One with little fruit trees in the pocket garden that give the stingiest, bitterest fruit he's ever had. He thinks that's somehow fitting of something.

Everyone assumes she's his mistress—a white man's mistress—and for 1941 Cardiff, that's protection of a sort. Eventually, she learns to accept the stigma though he sometimes still hears her crying in the bathroom, late at night, when she thinks he can't hear. Thinks he's sleeping. She has her pride, after all.

He asks her to marry him. It's more desperation and guilt than anything else. He hasn't shared her bed and she hasn't asked. She gives him that polite, watery smile and suggests rabbit for dinner, stirring her tea with one hand and working on her equations with the other. It's a very Toshiko-like answer and puts paid to that idea.

And time rolls on, like a wave.

*

She's working on a way to channel enough of the Rift's energy to power the laptop, but little enough to stay below the radar. She doesn't even realize she hasn't eaten or spoken in three days until Jack calls her on it.

She lets him drag her into the kitchen. He sits her down at the cheap Formica table and proceeds to make two of the most marvelous toasted cheese sandwiches she's ever had and a pot of the vilest tea. 

"I knew there was a reason we kept Ianto around," she jokes and Jack's face changes. All at once, she remembers the only thing she did pick up from Jack while wearing Mary's necklace, not even a thought so much as a feeling; a vague but palpable sense of longing.

"Jack," she says and covers his hand with hers.

*

Christmas Eve he's lying there, not sleeping, when he hears her soft footfalls on the stairs. She crawls over the foot of the couch and onto him, her naked skin flinching with the cold. "Don't say it," she says urgently, twining her hands through his hair. Her eyes are lucid, wide and scared—always so scared, Toshiko. They've always had that in common. "Don't say anything," she tells him and brings her mouth down on his.

They make love for almost two days straight. It's unsentimental, desperate. There are no declarations of love. There are no declarations at all. There's only the weight of years like a blanket and first gray hairs and a laptop that stubbornly refuses to work and two coworkers that hardly know each other and yet are all each other has left.

When it's over, Toshiko is different. Quieter. Less edgy. Something inside her has found its centerpoint and balanced. Jack envies her that. So bitterly envies her that.

They never touch—like that—again.

*

"Mattresses," she says, wriggling a little to settle her head in the overstuffed couch pillow. "The really good ones, with the space foam and little dials to make them as hard or soft as you like." Her back aches something fierce, particularly in the mornings, and she'd much rather blame it on the shoddy, antiquated mattresses than the encroachment of age.

"Good one." Jack tilts his head back to look at her and smiles approvingly before taking a handful of popcorn from the bowl between them and chowing it down. Even now, seven years later, that smile still fills her with a little warm glow of reassurance, the only real magic Jack's ever had.

"What about you?"

"Don't laugh," he says, pretty much guaranteeing she will, "but _Footballers' Wives_. I never did find out who killed Roger."

She does laugh, bright and delighted. "It was cancelled," she tells him and watches his face fall. "Back in May." Then, when she thinks he's been tortured enough, she adds, "And it was Garry."

"No," he says, disbelieving, and through handfuls of greasy popcorn—made on a stove!—and giggles, she tells him all about it.

*

_You can't die, can you?_ she whispers one night, cup of cocoa clasped between her fingers. Her bare toes curl over the chair's edge, unpolished, yellowing.

 _No,_ he answers helplessly. _I don't know._

These same words, all the time. It seems like all he _can_ say.

*

Everyone knows them at the ballroom. They don't talk about it; the truth is that it's less for hope of rescue than a final sense of connection that neither of them can quite give up.

Jack taught her to dance years ago and she found that she actually enjoyed twirling about in stiffly starched skirts and ridiculously high heels. These days, though, and after a particularly nasty spill down the icy front steps and a broken ankle, they mostly sit and let themselves fall under the trance of the music, dreaming.

It's where Jack meets most of his lovers and she watches him vanish into dark corners and empty rooms with something like fondness and only a little like melancholy. She takes no lovers of her own.

The last few years, Jack's been powdering his hair and carefully drawing on wrinkles with her eyeliner pencils, but they both know that soon enough, people will start to notice, start to talk. And then Jack, at least, will have to give this up too.

*

He comes home (home) one day and finds her kneeling in a puddle of shattered glass, her hand cut and bleeding fat crimson drops onto the wood. The light looks the same gleaming off her hair, off the glass, and he realizes that sometime when he wasn't looking it's gone completely white.

"I can't remember," she sobs when he kicks away the fragments and crouches in front of her. He presses his handkerchief into the wound after a cursory check for glass. "I can't…I can't…I can't remember their _names_."

He doesn't have to ask, the strange shorthand of long-time friends. "Suzie Costello," he says softly, urgently. "Ianto Jones, Owen Harper…"

"And Gwen," she breathes, relief thick in her tone. "Gwen Cooper. Yes." She takes off her thick black-framed bifocals with her unhurt hand and wipes the heel of her thumb across her streaming eyes. "Suzie Costello. Ianto Jones. Owen…Owen Harper. And Gwen Cooper." Toshiko looks up at him. "They didn't forget us, do you think? They wouldn't…you don't think they forgot?"

"No." He pulls her into his arms. When did she get so tiny, like a hollow-boned bird? "No, of course they didn't. They wouldn't do that."

"No," she agrees and rests her head on his shoulder. "No, of course not. Suzie. Ianto. Owen. Gwen."

On the second repetition, he chimes in with her and she falls asleep like that, mumbling the names of friends they haven't seen in more than thirty years.

_Suzie. Ianto. Owen. Gwen._

*

"I hate this mattress," she says fretfully, though soon enough it won't matter.

"I know." Jack smiles and it's as miraculous as was the first time she met him. 

"Jack…" She reaches up and pats his cheek. It's unworn, unlined, his hair still dark and thick, his teeth white and his own. "I wouldn't change it, none of it. Seeing, knowing, learning so much… It was my _joy_." Her finger cuts the track of his tears. "I want you to remember that, later. When it's time."

His eyes fall, hidden behind his lashes but she trusts him, just like she always has. She trusts him with her life.

*

"And this is Toshiko Sato."

He'd forgotten. He'd forgotten how young she looked, how completely untried, unprepared. She still looks shell-shocked and he tries to remember if she, like Ianto, lost anyone of consequence in the Battle of Canary Wharf. 

"Well, welcome aboard, Toshiko. Mind if I call you Tosh?"

She blinks at his accent and he tries not to imagine the mole in the crease of her thigh where it meets her buttock.

He should send her away, he knows that. 

So many things he _should_ do, starting with Lisa in the basement, or Suzie and the glove. 

I have time, he thinks, and knows he doesn't. Not really.

*

"I want you to have a look at this." Her new supervisor—Captain Jack, which sounds like a pirate of some sort, if you ask her—hands her a book. It's a journal, actually, leather-bound and cracking, pages musty with age. She turns back the cover and finds page after page of equations written in a wavering, unreliable hand.

"Is this a new assignment, sir?" she asks, flipping through the leaves without looking up. "Is it alien? This looks…" She trails off, caught by a cluster of numbers that she traces with her fingernail. When she does finally look up, Jack is smiling at her very strangely. It should creep her out more than it does. "This looks like a way to disperse time loops in the Rift. Is it yours? It seems…" 'Brilliant' is the first word that comes to mind, but she feels small and petty jealousy squeezing her stomach and her heart and she can't quite say it. If Captain Jack is capable of mathematics like these, what the hell is _she_ doing here?

"No," Jack says, still grinning that queer, fond smile. "It isn't alien. And it isn't mine. Just…see what you can make of it, all right?"

Toshiko taps her bottom lip thoughtfully. "Sure," she says finally. "Could be useful."

"Oh," Jack laughs, strangely shaky, "you have _no_ idea."


End file.
